Virtualization performance management: Myths and realities

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

Performance management has become the key element in maximizing any virtualization initiative, but many myths have emerged that, left unchecked, can stall an entire virtualization initiative. Here are the biggest myths and the corresponding realities to enable IT to chart an informed path forward and successfully scale deployments.

Reality: Performance management tools must be able to analyze information across all IT silos -- from the end user, to the application, to the network, to servers, VMs and storage -- covering both the physical and virtual metrics. Without this data, administrators cannot accurately pinpoint and troubleshoot potential performance issues, such as when there's a clash of resources across the WAN or a storage latency issue.

Myth No. 2: It is impossible to fully capture the end user experience as it happens.

Reality: Performance management solutions must capture the end user experience in order to ensure end user satisfaction, identified as the No. 1 factor in determining the success of any VDI implementation. If users can trigger a DVR recording of their activity when problems occur, administrators can capture the real-time load on the infrastructure, such as CPU, memory, storage and the interactions of the desktop. A recording like this gives users a simple and proactive way to immediately communicate with IT as soon as they encounter performance problems -- instead of trying to explain what went wrong after the fact.

Myth No. 3: Performance management doesn't have to be live.

Reality: To ensure performance of a virtualized infrastructure, you must deal with information associated with a huge number of objects in a live and continuous fashion. Without live, interactionally focused performance management you only have partial picture of what's happening in your infrastructure. Second-by-second insight allows IT to see what set of interactions caused a particular performance shift; this 'liveness' allows for triage versus post-mortem analysis.

Reality: Capacity planning and performance management provide complementary capabilities at opposite ends of the time scale. Capacity planning is useful to identify long-term, slow-moving trends that may affect production systems in the future. It can also be used in scenario-planning exercises to determine things such as the number of additional desktops that can be added to a VDI cluster. Performance management, on the other hand, is the only way to catch fast-moving contention events that occur in mere seconds or minutes.

Operationally, performance management is used every day to inspect the infrastructure as it dynamically shifts and flexes to accommodate user and application load. In production networks, performance management covers the immediate day-to-day requirements of understanding, troubleshooting and optimizing virtual data centers; capacity planning provides a long-term, future-facing view of slower moving events.

Myth No. 5: Virtualization is just another silo.

Reality: A virtualized environment is all about shared resources, as opposed to a separate and distinct silo. In virtualization, the silo walls have come down, and a holistic approach toward performance management is needed to manage these shared resources. IT must fully understand how virtualized applications impact other workloads to get the most value from their virtualization initiatives.

Myth No. 6: Agent-based software is necessary.

Reality: Agent-based software limits the scalability of virtualized environments -- increasing bottlenecks and duplication. Having a guest agent in every VM severely restricts IT's ability to scale their virtualized infrastructures -- and limits the extensibility that is required in order to accept data feeds from multiple silos.

Myth No. 7: Separate tools are OK in a virtualized infrastructure.

Reality: Understanding the causality of performance issues is critical in virtualization. IT needs to have understanding about the causality of performance issues, and to do so requires integrated insight in a single system -- for example, insight into all objects' interactions with other objects that, in fact, may be causing the problem. Virtualization is a dynamic infrastructure, and IT needs to monitor dynamic shifts as they occur to see correlation between objects and interactions.

Myth No. 8: Virtualizing line of business (LOB) applications is too risky.

Reality: Companies are realizing that virtualizing their LOB applications is absolutely necessary for them to achieve the full benefits of virtualization. With live and continuous, cross-silo insights spanning the physical and virtual, IT now has the understanding needed to ensure the performance and availability of their most critical applications -- stopping the stall and maximizing the value of initiatives.

Myth No. 9: ROI for performance management is impossible to determine in virtualization.

Reality: Effective performance management gives IT a way to maximize the full ROI of their virtualization initiatives by reducing time to problem resolution and extending their virtual footprint to include LOB applications. Both enhance virtualization's value to organizations and give IT the ability to more easily communicate the long-term value of the technology beyond capex savings in terms of hardware.

Myth No. 10: Large IT management vendors will lead virtualization management.

Reality: Managing virtualized environments differs in almost every way imaginable from managing a physical legacy environment. Third-party management vendors -- over enterprise management vendors -- are ahead of the game with the functionality -- and advanced interactional analytics capabilities -- designed specifically to manage dynamic virtualized environments, as well as growing hybrid infrastructures with multiple hypervisors.

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